3 June 2008

Though I could never study something as methodologically disciplined and potentially practical as psychology, general education requirements have left me with a knowledge of its key points, and the ability to make from them uninsightful extrapolations, none of this really worth mentioning except: it’s interesting that I still don’t really get any of these points, and that I have to relearn them all, for myself. Take, for instance, the famous self-destructive side of the personality. It’s real, just as I’d figured, but never felt for myself. (In fact, I acknowledged many just such profoundly disturbing things about myself, and while these thoughts were still fresh and abstract, I pinned them down in my psychology textbooks, and tried to shelve them away, forever unseen again.) My self-destructive side: my, is he ever bent on ruining me!

He’s stupid as all hell, and his calling card is the irrational thought. I think that’s why Albert Ellis uses "self-destructive" and "irrational" to mean the same thing. The self-destructive side is just that predicatably and without fail, stupid.

He made me think maybe I got Albert Ellis mixed up with another guy, so that I had to double-check for just long enough to forget what I was about to say, because it actually seemed worth saying...

He's too stupid to hate, like a swarm of bees, or a bigoted grandparent.

He'll try anything, anything to screw with me, barring a well-formed and well-premissed argument. He's so very unclever. And yet he often gets away with it. He comes up with the most brazenly stupid ideas when I'm groggy or distracted by far more important things. Somehow, he thought it sounded like a good idea to divide up the things I have to do into three very poorly defined classes, and to buy a different planner for each. And over the course of late 2006, I fell for it I bought three different 2007 planners.

He's why I haven't written here in so long: he remembered me thinking how shamefully neglectful so many people were, starting blogs and keeping them for a few weeks, leaving a clear record of their inability to stick with stuff.

You've got one, too, in case you didn't know. He seems like he’s not there. He vanishes before you can find him, but deep down, I think you know him as well as he knows you, which is very well: his favorite food is stuff you've recently heard is especially bad for you. His favorite music is catchy, his favorite songs include anything you hate, and anything that will keep you from your work. Most of all, he prefers anything he can pare down to a mocking fragment of a melody, and sing to you over and over and over. His turn-ons include anybody you cannot have sex with, because you cannot have sex with them.